By IT Brew Staff
less than 3 min read
Definition:
Continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) is a two-part process designed to streamline and automate significant parts of the software development life cycle. The CI/CD pipeline has a few core components:
- Continuous integration (CI): New code and tweaks to the existing codebase are regularly integrated into a project’s main branch or central source code repository. These commits are automatically tested, and if there’s a bug, a developer is expected to respond as quickly as possible.
- Continuous delivery (CD): While some definitions of CI/CD treat “continuous delivery” and “continuous deployment” as interchangeable concepts, they can exist as two different aspects of the software development cycle, depending on the development team’s tolerance for risk and hunger for automation. With continuous delivery, code that passes tests is automatically deployed to a staging environment, where developers can push it to production when they feel it’s necessary.
- Continuous deployment (CD): Continuous deployment automatically deploys code changes directly to a production environment, rather than staging.
By automating broad swaths of software testing and releasing, CI/CD frees development teams from some of the more time-intensive and arduous aspects of software development. For example, when software development was more of a manual process, teams would often fall behind on testing and debugging, which would result in cascades of errors and other issues when it came time for developers to integrate their code and features into new versions of the product.
Since developers often use CI/CD in conjunction with version control and a shared code repository, they can quickly roll back unexpected issues that might emerge during deployment. With the right setup, teams can also easily see what’s been integrated and deployed, allowing them to better plan future sprints. CI/CD has been particularly embraced by DevOps, which is committed to helping teams build new software products faster.
